Then a full swatch of painted landscape appeared - or rather reappeared - on the dining room wall.

“It’s going to look great,” art restorer Barbara Mangum said from behind goggles, a scalpel picking away at the paper inch by inch.

Except for her nimble fingers, her body barely moved.

This was meticulous and painstaking work.

Her assistant, Adriene Krefetz, was perched on a ladder, crouching into an area where the wall meets the low ceiling and dates back to 1773.

She laughed at the suggestion their backs must ache at the end of the day.

“Sore backs and sore necks and sore thumbs,” she said. “You get so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t even realize it.”

The women remained focused on the task at hand - reviving a century-old, floor-to-ceiling mural that appears to wrap around the room and has been hidden behind wallpaper for years.

The Raynham Historical Society brought them in to help restore the antique, white-sided house in the center of town to its original state.

Its last inhabitant, the late Isabelle Hannant, bequeathed it to the society shortly before her death in 1999.

Her landmark floral shop is still open next door, a draw for locals celebrating weddings and birthdays and anniversaries.

But inside the Hannant House, the mural has become the hub of the restoration effort. Mangum and Krefetz are archaeologists on a dig.

It has been papered over at least twice since Lester and Isabelle Hannant moved into the house in the 1920s.

“Isabelle was always painting and wallpapering the house,” recalled Maggie Silva, who is married to Hannant’s nephew, Ed.

Silva saw the mural for the first time in the mid-1960s. She had dropped in on Isabelle and found a contractor ripping off the wallpaper.

“I was very interested in Early American primitive art and I was so thrilled. I said to Isabelle, ‘it’s beautiful,’” she said.

“But she didn't like antiques. She wanted to make the place modern.”

Historical Society President Kathleen Roberts witnessed the second unveiling and repapering in the 1990s.

“I was so excited to see this painting underneath,” Roberts said.

And again, Hannant, by-then elderly, couldn’t be dissuaded. She wanted to freshen up the dining room with a new look.

Fortunately, both Silva and the Hannants’ niece, Carolyn Gorden, were there to capture the mural in photographs before it was sheathed behind pink and blue petals.

Those photos are now being used to aid in the revival.

Mangum had to find the best way to remove the wallpaper without harming the underlying, and by now deteriorating, painting.

Using her past studies in chemistry as well as art conservation, she settled on a solvent that dissolves the paste’s starch granules just enough to lift the wallpaper but not damage the wall plaster.

The women brush on the solvent, wait and then carefully lift tiny flaps of paper. They document their daily progress on a chart.

When the paper and paste are completely removed, they will apply a layer of varnish and return the mural to the artist’s intent by “connecting the dots,” Mangum says.

If a restorer paints directly over the mural, it takes away the value, she said.
The artist and date of the painting have not yet been determined.

Society members initially hoped the work might have been that of 19th century American folk art master Rufus Porter, who traveled around New England painting murals of seascapes and native landscapes.

But it is not a Porter, said Magnum, who has worked on conserving several of his murals.

Porter, who died in 1884, used distemper and watercolors.

This muralist painted in oils and was likely an early 20th century itinerant artist, who thought Porter’s style suited this house.

“Clearly the artist wanted the look of Rufus Porter. They are full of life and full of elm trees - so American and so historical,” she said.

After the restoration is complete, the house will be only one of a handful of vintage building in town open to the public.

It will contain documents, furniture, antique silver, photographs, books, records and memoirs of days gone by.

Historians hope it instills in local residents a desire to study and perpetuate their heritage.

A former chief conservator for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and owner of an art conservation service in Somerville, Mangum has devoted a career to saving important works of art, sculpture and monuments - even Egyptian mummy coffins - for posterity.

Regardless of its value to outsiders, the Hannant House mural is beautiful, well painted and is a part of Raynham’s past, she says.

Historic houses give us a sense of how we lived and moved.

“They are the local attic,” she said.

“It’s very important for people to have that and to share it. This is what conservation is all about, saving things that mean something to you,” she said.